Civics and Politics

By Nayaba Arinde
Editor-at-Large
The Electoral College. This is always a sticky and controversial conversation.
“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, but not all votes are created equal,” New York Attorney General Letitia James told Our Time Press. “The electoral college is a vestige of slavery, designed to benefit slave states while excluding non-white voters. And though voting rights have evolved since our electoral system’s inception, efforts to disenfranchise voters of color continue to this day. It is more important than ever that we fight that discrimination by making our voices heard at the ballot box and exercising our fundamental right to vote.”

Technically, all the millions of votes for the big two or any party that makes the ballot for the November presidential election are condensed into a few hundred electors who are chosen to represent millions of voters.

So, it will be the 538 members of the Electoral College who will actually punch in the votes for the next Democratic or Republican President of the United States.
“It is interesting and contradictory that in a so-called democratic society, the majority of the people don’t elect the president,” Brooklyn’s House of the Lord Rev. Herbert Daughtry told Our Time Press.

Millions of voters are being encouraged to come and vote their interest, but the reality is– it is those Electoral College members who will enact the vote that counts. Of course, they are meant to vote the way their state’s voting majority requires.

According to the National Archives, “Electoral votes are allocated among the States based on the Census. Every State is allocated a number of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives in its U.S. Congressional delegation—two votes for its Senators in the U.S. Senate plus a number of votes equal to the number of its Congressional districts.”
The 2024 allocations are based on the 2020 Census, for example:
New York has 28 electors voting, Connecticut 7, New Jersey 14, Florida 30, Texas 40, and California has 54.

Rev. Daughtry continued, “It must be terribly devastating to know more people voted for you, yet you must watch the person with fewer votes become president.”
Enter stage center-right in the 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
“She won the popular vote, but he ‘won’ the election through the Electoral College,” said Bed Stuy resident, brownstone owner, and concerned voter Mark Lawton.

“There are people in smaller states of hundreds of thousands of people who have more power than states with millions like New York. So, in a state that is up for grabs–a swing state, they have more power in the election.

“Trump says the election was stolen, but he lost the popular vote by millions. So he is saying their vote doesn’t count. They need to get rid of that system; it should be one person–one vote.
The US goes all around the world saying that everyone has the right to have their vote counted, but they aren’t doing it here. The Electoral College actually stops a lot of people from participating in voting because they don’t think that their vote counts.”

It is an old political chestnut that does the rounds at least every four years. Passionate debates ensue about preserving or reconstructing, or even abolishing the Electoral College political process.

The Electoral College is not a building or an online course but a body of 538 selected electors who choose the President and Vice President. The New York State electors in 2020 included Attorney General Tish James, Hazel Dukes, then-governor Andrew Cuomo, the Clintons, Andrea Stewart Cousins, and Carl Heastie.

The National Archives notes, “The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The Founding Fathers established it in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.”

That process, they add, “consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress.”

“When Americans vote for President in the general election, they select electors who will choose the nation’s chief executive,” states Congressional Research Services. “States receive the same number of electors as their number of Representatives and Senators…To win the presidency, a candidate must secure 270 electoral votes—a majority of 538 possible votes.”

Freedom Amendments lecturer at Medgar Evers College, former Assemblyman Roger Green told Our Time Press, “The Electoral College is one of the last remaining unjust laws that was enacted for the benefit of the slavocracy, a planter class who aspired to enforce white minority rule over the predominant African population that existed as a potential threat to their political and economic status.

Contemporary advocates for voter rights must put this history in context as we witness how current white supremacists and white ethno-nationalists are using the electoral college to enforce a new form of minority rule over an evolving multi-racial and multinational nation.”

With the Democratic National Convention coming up in Chicago on August 19th, 2024, VP Harris is flexing nationwide with her VP as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, but there are those who warn that there is a political romanticization in play, with a perceived obligation not to effectively critique or even debate past concerns while giving the Democratic Party the Black vote without any specific demands.

“The facts remain that there is double-digit unemployment in Black and brown communities,” former City Councilman Charles Barron told Our Time Press. “All politics are local, but only less than 20% of Democratic voters came out in the last Democratic primary elections…We should talk to the majority who don’t come out rather than trying to convince those who do.

But, the reality is that no matter who the candidates are, it is the Electoral College and the list of hard-to-retrieve names therein which choose the president, not the popular vote.”
Operation POWER co-founder, and former Brooklyn Assemblyman–Barron added, “The US had 240 million registered voters, in 2020 – 80 million stayed home.

“The masses of Black people don’t vote in local NYC elections. Only 20% of Democratic voters came out in the last primary elections – out of 60,000 registered voters in one assembly district voters only about 6,000 came out, less than 20 percent.
“We should talk to the majority who don’t come out, rather than trying to convince those that do.
In 2020, President-elect Biden got 81 million votes, Trump got 74 million, and 3 to 5 million voted independent–around 160 million came out.

“80% come out in most countries. In America, 62% came out, nearly 40 percent stayed home. The masses in America don’t trust the American government and its electoral system. From Carter to Biden they lose the majority of the white vote, and they only win because they get 80-90% of the Black vote.”